The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to the delivery of services to a user of a mobile terminal. The services may be in the form of a particular media or communication application desired by the user, such as a music player, a game player, an electronic book, short messages, email, etc. The services may also be in the form of interactive applications in which the user may respond to a network device or another mobile terminal in order to share information, perform a task or achieve a goal. The services may be provided from an application that runs at a network server or other network device, or even from the mobile terminal such as, for example, a mobile telephone, a mobile television, a mobile gaming system, etc.
As mobile electronic devices become more and more ubiquitous, it is increasingly common for people to integrate such devices into their social lives. Communications with friends and even meeting new friends can often be facilitated using mobile terminals. In this regard, there have been numerous Internet based and other services directed at integrating communication and socialization via mobile terminals. For example, certain applications such as blogs, photoblogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, and numerous others, enable the sharing of information or expression between users of mobile electronic devices. Such applications often provide further services beyond mere collections of person information such as pictures, audio files, video files, etc. in order to enhance the socialization capabilities and enjoyment of the participants. For example, participants may be able to comment on content of another, add another's content to their own favorites, reply to another's content with content of their own, etc. Additionally, such services are often benefited when they can be provided with a relatively high level of immediacy.
A typical model of currently available social applications would include two general aspects. First, user A provides information for consumption by other users. The information may be provided, for example, by posting comments or pictures to a blog or other suitable web based service. Second, user B accesses and consumes the information provided by user A. User B may access the information, for example, by reading blog posts, browsing pictures, etc. Although the model above is sufficient to provide information to other users, some may consider that current implementations are not yet able to provide information regarding multiple users to a single consumer in a comprehensive and yet simple way. For example, if user B wishes to access information provided by users C and D in addition to the information provided by user A, it is common that user B will be required to access information provided by each of the users (A, C and D) separately, thereby increasing the time and effort required to access such information and decreasing the enjoyment of user B. Furthermore, if users A, C or D should update their information, currently, in mobile environments, applications do not provide a mechanism by which user B can automatically receive such updated information in response to the update since such a capability often creates concerns regarding resource consumption. To the contrary, current applications would typically require user B to manually search for updated information or respond to an invitation from user A, C or D to view new information. Although some applications provide for periodic scheduled updates, the updates are not automatically provided to other users (i.e., “pushed”) in response to the update itself.
Thus, a need exists to provide a mechanism by which to automatically provide updated information to users in a comprehensive and yet simple way, which may also improve the experiences of users in mobile environments.